03/21/2017

Why all night?

Usually I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, but last night I got up all night. I got up and continued to ask the owl why he couldn’t just give it a rest. Honestly, I enjoy the sounds of a hooting owl, but you know sometimes they can overdo it.

Going outside in the middle of the night to try and locate the owl is about stupid when you think about it. I can’t see at night and not too well in the daytime, but I guess I just needed something to do or perhaps see if this owl was as big as it sounded.

How does one figure out how big an owl is by the sound of its hoot?

You don’t.

A "barred owl," not a "barn owl"

Not being able to locate the owl, I went back inside to remain awake looking up and still listening. I later figured out my owl to be a barred owl that I really wanted to “dis-bar” in the middle of the night.

What exactly makes owls do this? They say they are talking and that they stay up all night talking and other interesting things. This sounds like a teenaged girls’ spend the night party or something, but the girls generally give up and go to sleep. My owl did not.

The next day I started researching the reasons for the owl hooting all night, again not that smart, because there is nothing I can do about it. One of the local counties stated that, “During the courtship season in late fall and early winter, the barred owl can be the source of some very strange sounds.”

Well, it’s almost spring. As a matter of fact, we are right on top of spring coming. These same nature experts noted that one of the ways the male and female owls acknowledge each other and strengthen their bond is by greeting each other with a series of hoots and monkey-like screams.

This was something that I was very thankful for – the fact that this owl or what is probably owls have not gotten to the monkey-like screams yet.

Now that I have figured out that breeding season is mid-winter to mid-spring, I guess I will just have to guess that my owl is a little slow moving when it comes to the next step. Nature is nature, owls are owls and now in addition to keeping me up, he’s going to be out there bragging about it…

So I will just be envious of the owl and appreciate the many cool things that owls are equipped to do. Things like having three eyelids: one for blinking, one for sleeping and one for keeping his eye clean. Three eyelids make me think of all those kids back in school who could flip their eyelids up and make those terrible faces.

They say some barn owls can eat up to 1000 mice a year – perhaps I should see about attracting those. What do you call a group of owls? A parliament, wisdom, bazaar or study. The “wisdom” name, I understand… The others, not so much.

One other thing, for most owl species, the females are larger, heavier and more aggressive than the males. I’ve got to stop researching such things, because now I’m worried about the monkey-like screams these big aggressive females are probably going to make.

One last thing I read was that if you see or hear an owl, it could be a blessing or a bad omen. This spiritual expert said to “Pay close attention to what happens immediately after you see or hear the owl.” If something good happens, then you will have good fortune. If something bad happens, then bad news is coming. Well, that does beat all…

What I did was to go out in the yard in my boxer shorts and look up into the trees…. which was stupid… so I must be going to have stupid news coming.

I kind of believe that.

CMT Column from the week of March 6, 2017, All Rights Reserved and Stuff like that...